Medical image standardization may have many applications. For example, medical image standardization may provide normalized input data for quantification algorithms, database homogeneity, and/or homogenous visualization. Medical image standardization, however, may be an issue for magnetic resonance imaging. Because of, but not only, the sheer number of parameters that are involved in MR acquisition, the same sequence/protocol may provide different outputs significantly vary between the same scanner model at different institutions, between vendors etc. Since the intensity distribution is changed, it makes quantification algorithms very dependent on acquisition parameters, institutions, and/or protocols.
The results are often unequal due to the variations in acquired data, for example, a level of brightness depending on the sequence and the protocol the input data was acquired in. In an example, the results of segmentation by two physicians may differ because of the differences in the physician's training in MRI data acquisition. Different machines, different sequences, or different settings may provide different intensities. Different environmental conditions may lead to different results even from the same machine or patient from scan to scan.